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Who's actually doing this
It's a fair question to ask an AI-native firm: if software is coming off a line, who's accountable when it's wrong?
The honest answer is that automation raises the stakes on judgement rather than removing them. AI will confidently build the wrong thing, beautifully, at speed. Everything that decides whether your project succeeds — understanding the problem, choosing what to build, knowing when the plausible answer is the wrong one, saying no to scope that shouldn't exist — is still entirely human. It's just that there's less noise around it now.
So the right question isn't whether we use AI. It's who is exercising the judgement, and what have they seen. Between the two of us that's the national electricity grid, a government fisheries platform, an insurance merger, a trading bank, a city council's data platform — and a working fabrication workshop, which is where the word factory comes from.
You're not buying a team of contractors behind an account manager. You're dealing with the people who do the work.
Founder
Built the agency, then the platforms underneath the institutions.
Matt ran Stripe the Web, a Wellington web agency, until Solnet acquired it in 2015 — Solnet itself later going to Accenture. So the failure modes of agency delivery aren't theoretical here. Scope that grows quietly. Estimates defended rather than revised. A discovery phase priced like a project. Software Factory is built to not do those things, by someone who has done them.
The decade after that was spent inside the institutions, on the layer underneath the applications: cloud platforms, then data platforms, now AI. BNZ, then Deloitte, then back to BNZ, and most recently contracting to Auckland Council. Regulated banking and local government are slow, audited environments with real consequences for getting it wrong — which is where the habits behind 'enterprise-grade by default' actually come from.
Alongside it he runs a fabrication workshop — CNC, 3D printing and scanning, custom furniture, van fit-outs — and took it from hand tools and one-offs to tooled, repeatable production. That transition is the whole thesis of this business. A factory isn't about volume. It's about the hundredth part matching the first, because the jig and the checks make it so.
Today he operates a portfolio of production systems — manufacturing job management, accounting, HR, financial reporting, AI infrastructure — most of them running a real business daily, several of them his own. The delivery platform underneath Software Factory is the same one those were built on. It isn't a pitch deck; it's the tooling he uses every day.
Technical Lead
Twenty years leading the systems that can't be wrong.
Darren has been delivering web applications professionally since 2006, most of it as a technical lead. The work has a consistent shape: high-stakes, mission-critical systems for enterprise and government, where a defect isn't an embarrassment but a real-world consequence.
At Transpower he led delivery on two systems that directly affect the national electricity grid — a transmission pricing platform integrating around ten upstream systems to run legislation-driven calculations, and a cost allocation system that replaced a patchwork of spreadsheets and manual process. For the Ministry for Primary Industries he was technical lead on migrating the Fisheries Information System off a legacy PowerBuilder platform: roughly 1,500 screens in a year, hit by devising an automated migration and testing approach rather than by adding people. For nib Insurance he spent two years on the customer-facing rebuild that merged two separate systems after a corporate merger, and it's live in production today.
That last instinct is why this partnership works. Faced with 1,500 screens and a fixed deadline, his answer was to industrialise the work — the same move Matt made in the workshop, arrived at independently, years before AI made it fashionable. Software Factory is what happens when two people who both already automated their own craft point that instinct at the whole delivery process.
He also brings the parts of delivery that AI can't do for you: scoping and estimation, architecture and data modelling, client liaison and governance, and the code review culture that makes a standard hold. Across nearly two decades he has been the person other developers' work went through.
Not a recent introduction
Darren was Matt's first senior developer at Stripe the Web, the Wellington agency Matt ran before the workshop. He arrived as lead developer in 2013 and spent two years there.
In 2015 Solnet acquired the agency, and Accenture later acquired Solnet. Darren went with it, and spent the next decade as a technical lead inside a global consultancy — solution design, estimation, governance, and delivery for enterprise and government clients. From there to Transpower, and the systems that price and balance the national electricity grid. Matt went out the other side into the institutions, building cloud and data platforms for a bank and a council.
So the enterprise record on this page didn't happen somewhere else and get imported. It grew out of the shop Matt built — one of us up through the consultancy that bought it, the other through the platforms underneath the country's larger organisations.
Thirteen years later we're building together again, on purpose. In a two-person firm the biggest delivery risk isn't skill, it's whether the two people actually work. That question was settled a long time ago.
Matt hires Darren as his first senior developer.
Solnet acquires the agency. Accenture later acquires Solnet.
Darren leads delivery through Solnet and Accenture, then Transpower. Matt into BNZ, Deloitte and Auckland Council — cloud and data platforms — and the workshop.
Back together, with two decades of other people's hard problems behind us.
What that means for you
The people you meet are the people who build it. Nothing is handed down to a bench of juniors after you sign, because there isn't one.
One named engineer signs off every merge. When something's wrong there's a person to call, not a ticket queue.
We're not going to pretend otherwise. It's why you own the code and the IP outright, and why the method is published — so continuity never depends on us still being here.
No account manager in between. Intake is a working session with whoever would run the job.
Start a build